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A space telescope capable of high-contrast imaging has been recognized as the avenue toward finding terrestrial planets around nearby Sun-like stars and characterizing their potential habitability. It is thus essential to quantify the…
Observations of stellar surfaces - except for the Sun - are hampered by their tiny angular extent, while observed spectral lines are smeared by averaging over the stellar surface, and by stellar rotation. Exoplanet transits can be used to…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
Understanding the climates of terrestrial exoplanets and the detectability of biosignatures is an inherently interdisciplinary challenge, requiring the integration of insights from Solar System exploration, exoplanet observations and…
Over 300 extrasolar planets have been found since 1992, showing that planetary systems are common and exhibit an outstanding variety of characteristics. As the number of detections grows and as models of planet formation progress to account…
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered and the search for life outside Earth is at the forefront of astrophysical research. The planets we observe show a mind-blowing diversity that current theories strive to explain as part of the…
Microlensing is a proven extrasolar planet search method that has already yielded the detection of four exoplanets. These detections have changed our understanding of planet formation ``beyond the snowline'' by demonstrating that…
Observational surveys for extrasolar planets probe the diverse outcomes of planet formation and evolution. These surveys measure the frequency of planets with different masses, sizes, orbital characteristics, and host star properties. Small…
I review the major open science questions in exoplanet atmospheres. These are mainly focused in the areas of understanding atmospheric physics, the atmosphere as a window into other realms of planetary physics, and the atmosphere is a…
Super-Earths, a class of planetary bodies with masses ranging from a few Earth-masses to slightly smaller than Uranus, have recently found a special place in the exoplanetary science. Being slightly larger than a typical terrestrial planet,…
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
Thousands of exoplanets orbit nearby stars, showcasing a remarkable diversity in mass, size, and orbits. With the James Webb Space Telescope now operational, we are observing exoplanet atmospheres and aiming to reach down to small,…
This chapter reviews various methods of detecting planetary companions to stars from an observational perspective, focusing on radial velocities, astrometry, direct imaging, transits, and gravitational microlensing. For each method, this…
Visible and near-infrared spectra of transiting hot Jupiter planets have recently been observed, revealing some of the atmospheric constituents of their atmospheres. In the near future, it is probable that primary and secondary eclipse…
While recently discovered exotic new planet-types have both challenged our imaginations and broadened our knowledge of planetary system workings, perhaps the most compelling objective of exoplanet science is to detect and characterize…
Several concepts have been brought forward to determine where terrestrial planets are likely to remain habitable in multi-stellar environments. Isophote-based habitable zones, for instance, rely on insolation geometry to predict…
The transit method, during which a planet's presence is inferred by measuring the reduction in flux as it passes in front of its parent star, is a highly successful exoplanet detection and characterization technique. During transit, the…
Transmission spectra probe the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets, but these observations are also subject to signals introduced by magnetic active regions on host stars. Here we outline scientific opportunities in the next decade for…
The breadth of topics that encompass the search for life has expanded and evolved significantly since the emergence of the field of astrobiology. Initial astrobiology centered investigations focused on detecting biosignatures in the Martian…